“The gore and tenacity to take the consecrated Host and desecrate it by piercing a nail through it and discarding the Blessed Sacrament. ”

Ok… what about it?

“When you are in grave pain, cry out in Mercy by saying Jesus, I Trust in You…at the final Hour of your death. ”

And if, as seems most likely to people with even a passing knowledge of PZ’s beliefs, that doesn’t happen? What then? This individual seems to have problems finishing their, er, thoughts I guess we’ll call them.

“All the wisdom of the world” is just one option, PZ. When I became a professor I chose invisibility. Very useful. But sometimes I think flying would be even better. Or exploding heads with the power of my mind. (Perhaps you forgot to check the right box in the professorship sign-up form.)

I had some really massive gas the other night and cried out to jesus. It didn’t help, but farting (later) did. Why should I believe that jesus is suddenly going to change his policy of letting me suffer with gas when I’m faced with eternal torment?

Please file all wisdom-based complaints with the University of Minnesota, Office of Employee Wisdom Compensation. All complaints take 8-12 weeks to process, and will be decided upon by an anonymous panel of administrative personnel. In the meantime, please do not contact the Office, as it may invalidate your claim.

Hold up,
Souls don’t exist, at least so far as anyone can prove.
Secondly, assuming one could prove the existence of souls, I thought atheists were soulless. End result, how do you burn in hell if you have no immortal soul that can be sent to hell?

If professors get super powers like omniscience, or invisibility, I would totally go for not needing to sleep. Not being incapable of sleeping mind you, I’d do it now and again for kicks, but simply being capable of functioning for months without sleeping (think of the productivity). Plus if you go for omniscience you can’t really do research to find out things you don’t know, which makes you a terrible scientist.

There are several places online to buy oblaten (the unleavened wafers,) so you, too, can have fun desecrating them. Or, you could make lebkuchen. Be sure to consecrate it first, and notice the subtle difference in flavor.

Your deity is supposed to have all the wisdom in the cosmos. So why, when a recalcitrant serfling like PZ Myers does something it disapprove of, is its response to wait till he’s dying and say “Neener, neener!” ?. Not even an attempt to reason with him first? Even an average human leader knows to try that.

I always wondered, ya know, to which hell atheists go to when they die. Because they don’t believe in any gods, how is it determined to which hell they go? Muslim heel, which is full of christians, or presbyterian hell, full of catholics and dead babies? Hindu hell, buddhist hell, or Elfheim? Perhaps PZ will go to planet Venus, where mormon hell is (if planet Kolob is their heaven, their hell has to be a planet).

Why is this still news? Did the faithful not get the bishops letter on this, all those years ago? Or could we take it that this is sign that they are moving towards the future with them now being allowed to recognise that there are people who do not subscribe to their delusion.

Come on people, why do you think the spender of the e-mail misspoke. This person believes that the cracker becomes the flesh of christ. Drive a nail through flesh, one gets gore. (Did this person think that PZ was engaged in a scene from Mel Gibson’s Jesus gore fest?) Please, keep in mind some of the old Catholic stories of Jews torturing wafers and geysers of blood sprouting.

As for me, I am not sure what was actually the most gory part of PZ’s action, the coffee grounds or the banana peel.

My first thought when reading this was to think that religion will never go away. Anyone who writes a missive that is so infested with malapropisms as this one is, is clearly too stupid to outwit the liars for Jesus and escape to freedom. On the other hand, sheep tend to go with the rest of the herd, so if we can just reach that tipping point where the majority don’t believe in things like magic biscuits, zombies, talking animals, levitating virgin mothers and the like, the sheep will follow reason.

Don’t be silly; wisdom isn’t bestowed by with a title. To get all the wisdom in the world you need to either eat the Salmon of Wisdom or to hang yourself from the World Tree for nine days. Or maybe both — what do I know?

Don’t be silly; wisdom isn’t bestowed by a title. To get all the wisdom in the world you need to either eat the Salmon of Wisdom or to hang yourself from the World Tree for nine days. Or maybe both — what do I know?

Religious zealots realize that they can no longer get away with burning non-believers in this world, so they have to resort to threatening non-believers with an eternity of burning in hell. I wonder if they realize that’s not a particularly scary proposition to someone who doesn’t believe there’s a hell… nah they don’t realize that. That would require logic and thought and all of that shit, which isn’t really their thing.

I think Caine has part of it right but missed the cause; ‘ellipsis’ is a nice posh sounding word. It goes with eschatology and ontology and evolution and all those other edumacation words that they so love to abuse. Abuse the word, disprove the theory. Sort of semantic homeopathy. Makes about as much sense as any of the other foolishness they get up to.

Buying unconsecrated wafers just isn’t as much fun: you might as well save money and buy rice-flour wafers. The cracker is just a cracker until a properly sprinkled and oiled shaman repeats the correct magic spell over it. Then it become a cracker that has the power to enrage Some Christians. BTW, what do the evangelicals do to get worked up? Church is so boring without a little bread and wine at the break.

I believe that the ellipses are there to give the s>victim , I mean reader time to contemplate consequences or threatened imaginary torments in full detail.

Said it before and will say it again: I think none of these people actually understand what it is to burn. I’ve only had a couple of first-degree ones and that was bad enough, thank you.

Perhaps if we took to carrying lighters &c and using them at opportune moments we’d make our point (of course we’d also end up in jail, and there’s no sense sinking to their level…). They are likely not going to appreciate a quick lesson in Koine Greek while flailing and screaming and crying for help, either.

The critics of the New Atheists are right – the truth value of religious beliefs has very little to do with the practice of religion. Whether or not Jesus felt the Wrath Of Myers™ is external to the hurt that this individual felt at the news of the Wrath Of Myers™. It would be missing the point to suggest that the severity of the action is contained in the metaphysical embodiment of Jesus in a cracker, only the perception of the metaphysical embodiment of Jesus in a cracker! And as such, the lack of New Atheist nuance neglects the pain and suffering the Wrath Of Myers™ causes in very real terms by hinging the debate on the imaginary pain of a nonsentient bit of bread…

I think I mentioned this in one of my very first posts here, but unsurprisingly it’s relevant once again.

When you’re reading something with Random Capitalization or the even more fun ALL CAPS the best thing to do is read the whole thing in Christopher Walken’s voice. William Shatner works too, but I find Walken more entertaining.

Of course, the irony is that if PZ were to invoke the name of Jesus on his death bed, Christians believe this grants him an all-expenses paid trip to heaven.

The whole point of dying is to have your soul sorted to your post-death apartment complex. Soul sorting is based on professed belief at the time of death (and/or whenever Jesus comes back to Earth), not on any worldly considerations.

If PZ says “I trust in Jesus” at the moment of death, that’s good enough.